Since the announcement of the Raelians/Clonaid clones, there has been much public debate on the subject of human cloning. As far as I can tell it falls into the following catagories:

1) Cloning of humans is unethical, people have an intrinsic right to be unique, this is a sick and twisted abuse of knowledge, from scientists who play god.

2) Cloning of humans in unethical, there hasnt been enough research yet. Think of the poor child. I have to qualms with creating clones to be killed and raided for spare parts when we can be sure that none will die before being born.

Of course, I have paraphrased slightly, but unfortunately not by much. The people involved here are either saying that cloning is evil, and that is the end of it, or cloning is evil when perfectly good spare parts are being wasted.

The world seems to be full of misconceptions about cloning, for example the idea of a clone being an exact physical double of the origional, at the same physical age (I am aware there are sometimes complications regarding genetic age, I am not talking about that), with all their memories and personality. This is total nonsense.

People have told me many times about how cloning could have created vast armys of Adolf Hitlers, or some other infamous person from history.

Cloning seems like a perfectly sensible idea to me if done well, I'm sorry to all of you who disagree, and I dont suggest mass cloning, it is irresponsible at this point in time, but I believe each clone should have their own rights, and they are a different person.

Identical twins are classed as different people, so should clones. In some cases clones may even have a stronger relationship with their DNA donor than children do to their parents. I'm sure that cloning will cause many problems, but these will all be to do with people's fears and misconceptions, as things seem to be in this world.

You may remember the first IVF child, Louisa Brown, I believe. Many people thought that concept was disgusting, and im sure many thought it could lead to cloning so were doubly disgusted.

As it seems it may have, people are now thinking of designer babies. Although I do not like the idea, can somebody explain the ethical difference between designer babies and using clones for spare parts for the origional owner of the DNA?

"Is this a potential life, or a life with potential" - I cannot find the author of this quote, but I think it sums up the problem I have with the cloning/spare parts hypocrisy.